Teamwork reverses school's fortune

Group learning seen as key to students' scores

STOCKTON - Undeterred by the foreboding sky threatening rain, fifth-grade teacher Talia Ortega led her 30 students to the Nightingale Charter School playground last week, not for fun and games but to study the water cycle.

STOCKTON - Undeterred by the foreboding sky threatening rain, fifth-grade teacher Talia Ortega led her 30 students to the Nightingale Charter School playground last week, not for fun and games but to study the water cycle.

It was windy and chilly, but the students didn't seem to mind as they sat on the basketball court, forming a tight circle. Ortega spoke of precipitation, condensation and evaporation. She asked her students to look for evidence of each.

"Miss Ortega," a student shouted a few minutes later, peering into the hollow of a fence post near the school's barren garden. "A new discovery: water."

After years of struggle at the south Stockton campus, there's a sense of excitement flowing these days through Nightingale.

"I see a change in our students," said Ortega, in her seventh year at Nightingale.

Only four years ago, Nightingale's Academic Performance Index Score of 578 was tied for the lowest in Stockton Unified. The state was in the midst of its budget crisis and wholesale layoffs were an annual occurrence.

The Stockton Unified superintendent's office had a new occupant on a seemingly annual basis, and each change of leadership brought new mandates from downtown. Frustration among teachers grew steadily as they tried to educate Nightingale's population of students, most from low-income backgrounds and many from homes where English is not the primary language.

In 2010, Nightingale was one of seven Stockton Unified K-8 campuses identified by the state as "persistently low performing," a classification that made it eligible for federal School Improvement Grant funding that would pay for implementation of radical and in some cases unpopular changes.

Though Stockton Unified failed in its bid for the grants in 2010, change remained a mantra. The district office's next idea was to convert Nightingale to an all-male campus. Staff and the community reacted angrily. For a time, second-grade teacher Gina Muro even segregated the seating in her classroom by gender. "A protest," she called it.

The teachers had their own ideas. They believed the way to reach Nightingale's students was to teach the California academic standards by having them collaborate on group projects.

"This type of teaching is totally different," Ortega said. "I came into teaching where they gave you your manual and they said, 'This is what you do.' ... This is more of a holistic way of teaching."

The foray to the playground by Ortega's class was an opportunity to provide students with a blended lesson that touched on science and language skills and pushed the students to question things they were seeing. It gave the students what Ortega said was "an authentic" experience.

While Ortega's fifth-graders were on the playground, first-graders sat in their class learning about the time zones and temperatures in New York, Guadalajara, China and Stockton; second-graders stood before classmates presenting information on recycling; fourth-graders juggled imaginary budgets to spend on family vacations they had been assigned to plan; and eighth-graders created avatars.

Avatars? Teacher Katie Burns had asked groups of students to imagine fantasy creatures and to assign them a range of characteristics ranging from what they would eat to the type of habitat in which they would reside. In the coming days, the students will create three-dimensional models of the creatures they created.

"It's more fun than we used to have," said Juliana Gonzalez, 13, part of a group that devised a fast-running animal that smells with its hair and wears climbing gloves on its hands. "Now, we're getting to do more nature and science."

Burns said one of the benefits of the project-based approach is her students have become an ensemble.

"I hear them talking in the hallways about their project," said Burns, in her seventh year at Nightingale. "They're planning. They'll bring their folders home, they'll work at home on it. I'm just not used to seeing that."

Two years ago, the teachers waged a successful fight to make Nightingale a charter school within Stockton Unified. The charter immunized the project-based approach from outside tampering, and the teaching method is now in its first year of full implementation.

Two other positive factors also are in play. The newest principal, Myra Machuca, is in her second year at Nightingale and is popular with her staff. And Stockton Unified finally won School Improvement Grant funding in 2012, with Nightingale's $1.7 million a year share paying for an extra hour of school each day and four hours of school each Saturday, among other things.

Perhaps most encouraging of all is that the school's turnaround began before the changes were put in place. Since 2009, when Nightingale was tied for Stockton Unified's lowest test score, the school's API has risen 94 points. Machuca said the possibility of reaching 700 this year gives her "goose bumps," and she said she believes it's inevitable the school ultimately will reach the state's target score of 800.

"There are schools across California that have had cultural transformations and created models for other schools to base themselves on," Stockton Unified Assistant Superintendent Kirk Nicholas said. "Nightingale is on that trajectory. They've built a culture of achievement."